Fig (35 page)

Daddy is leaning against the side of the truck, and Mrs. Sherman is on the sidewalk teetering in her heels, listening to him talk. I had no idea he had so much to say.

As she listens, Mrs. Sherman chews on her straw when she isn't taking long drinks from the perspiring wax cup, and I can almost see how they used to be—two teenagers in love. Daddy keeps talking and she is nodding her head, and never once does she look away. Then she touches him. She reaches for him with her manicured fingers, and I can see her long red claws as she squeezes his shoulder. Daddy looks at her hand, and then he looks at her, and they don't say anything.

They just look at each other forever before Mrs. Sherman steps forward and closes in on my father. She kisses him on the cheek and lingers there until finally she pulls back and walks away. She looks sad, and Daddy is staring at his feet. I see the way his fingers flutter to his face, touching where she just was, and I wonder when the last time was a woman kissed him.

Mrs. Sherman comes clicking toward me on the sidewalk, and when she sees me she looks down. Like most people, she pretends I don't exist. She passes me, and I hear the drugstore bells on the door ring again and I feel the breeze of the door swinging shut. Across the street, I see Sissy Baxter pretending not to be watching as she waters the potted geraniums in front of The Flower Lady.

When I climb into the truck, Daddy is behind the wheel, pretending to read the newspaper.

“All set?” he asks, and when he looks at me I see the red stamp of lipstick on his cheek left by Mrs. Sherman, and the cab stinks of her perfume, but I say nothing.

Daddy turns the key, shifts into first, and pulls the truck onto the street. Shifting gears again, my father heads for home as if he's done no wrong.

*  *  *  *

Mama is watching me.

I feel her eyes follow me as I set her breakfast tray down on the little wooden table in front of her—and she continues to watch as I empty the ashtray and prepare to administer her morning medication. The wafers sit behind small plastic windows like an Advent calendar, and I have to use my fingernail to peel away the foil backing, and this motion alone is enough to trigger picking.

Today is the last day of the final reintegration trial. Next time my mother comes home, she comes home for good.

Mama opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue, but her eyes still wander. They wander all over me. After the wafer dissolves, she takes a long drink of water. She hands the glass back to me, letting her fingers trail—they trail down my arm, reaching to touch my long crimson skirt.

Mama touches the skirt like she remembers, and she should; this skirt belongs to her, to my former mother, and when she searches my face her eyes fill with recognition. They fill with recognition the way I've seen them fill with tears, and I hold my breath and cross my fingers to keep her from wiping this away like she wipes away her tears every time she cries.

commencement:
n.
1. A beginning; a start 2. A graduation ceremony.

September 1, 1992

Everything is a test.

I am tested again and again, and yet I haven't picked or cut myself in forever. Billy's treatment plan is working, although he insists I'm the one doing all the work.

“Kiddo,” he says, “you need to give yourself a lot more credit.”

But how can I give myself credit when Daddy increasingly treats me like a little girl? The older I get, the more patronizing he becomes. I've been waiting and waiting for today to come, and now that it is finally here my father is refusing to let me come along. He wants to pick Mama up from the hospital by himself, even though he knows I thought we'd do this together as we should.

“Don't you have homework?” he asks when I protest. “Or the SAT to study for?” And then he leaves, all fast; he acts like I'm going to stop him or hijack the truck—like I'm going to do something crazy. So I call Billy to calm down.

“Fig,” he says, “you've got to remember, Annie is his wife.”

This is what he says because he has to. After all, Billy is my father's brother, and his younger one at that. But I know what Billy really thinks; he doesn't always agree with Daddy, especially when it comes to me. Billy understands and appreciates the bond between Mama and me. He sees how I help her to remember who she is and all the good she has ever done. Billy tells me all the time how good I am with her, whereas Daddy never does. This is because my father secretly blames me for every single time my mother has come undone.

Daddy is a contradiction. He doesn't want me around Mama, yet he expects me to help out. For example, we spent the entire summer getting the house ready for Mama's final return. Gran called it “babyproofing,” and everyone ignored her. Dr. Stein, my mother's psychiatrist, advised us to buy a large steel lockbox, and this is where the medication is now kept to prevent Mama from ever helping herself to it again.

While I was taking a walk with my uncle, Daddy programmed the four-digit code that opens the lock on the lockbox. And now he is the only one who can open Pandora's Box. “Just in case,” he says, but he doesn't finish. “In case of what?” When I make it a point to ask him, he acts like there is no answer, and when I ask again he suddenly cannot hear me.

During the last reintegration trial, Daddy doled out enough pills every morning for me to administer to Mama throughout the day: breakfast, lunch, dinner, bedtime, and as needed. He is paranoid. He hides the daily dose in a new place every time. So every morning before he goes to work, he has to stop and show me where he hid the medication for that particular day. This ritual seems like overkill; aside from Mama's overdose over ten years ago, she hasn't exhibited any signs of being suicidal.

Mama still refuses to sleep upstairs, so we found her a recliner at the same garage sale where I bought a narrow pair of black leather Mary Janes, an Edwardian nightgown with a crocheted neckline, and a leopard-print pillbox hat that looks amazing with my new hair. Unlike the clothes, the recliner is hideous—something my former mother would have detested. But the recliner is more comfortable than the rocking chair that Daddy made for her once upon another time.

Outside, in the driveway, Daddy sprayed the recliner with fire-retardant. He soaked the ugly blue upholstery. “Just in case,” he said, and I didn't need an explanation, yet this time he insisted on providing one. I kept telling him I understood, but he would not stop talking. If Mama fell asleep with a lit cigarette, she could die. This is what I tried to tell him, but he just looked at me grimly and said, “Fig, we could all die if that happened.” Then he shook his head.

Once the upholstery was dry, we carried the chair into the day porch, and I covered it with a crocheted wool afghan I'd found in the attic. The outline is black, but each square contains a different-colored flower. I found it when I was going through my paternal great-grandmother's steamer trunk looking for more vintage clothes. The uglier something is, the harder I work to make it beautiful—the afghan will not only hide the terrible chair, it will create a barrier between the fire retardant and my mother's precious skin. And this is what I do for myself: I wear only beautiful clothing now, and each garment works to keep my fingernails away from my flesh.

Maybe because of Mama's parents, Daddy is prepared for fire. His precautions make me think about
Jane Eyre
and the madwoman in the attic who liked to play with matches. And I wonder if he's ever read the book. He screwed a smoke detector to the ceiling in the day porch and mounted a red fire extinguisher to the wall above the washing machine. The extinguisher is the same stop-sign red as the blinking light on the detector. I inspected the devices while Daddy watched. And once again, he said, “Just in case.”

He says “just in case” so much, he is beginning to sound like a paranoid schizophrenic. “Just in case,” I said back, and I didn't say it nice. I sounded a lot like Mama when she has an episode.

Later when I tried to explain to Billy why Daddy and I are fighting all the time, he smiled a sad smile. “Fig,” he said, “you do realize what you guys have in common?” And when I shrugged and looked out the window, he said, “You two worry more than anyone I have ever known.”

The red light on the smoke detector winks at me from the ceiling and brings me back into the present moment. I clear my head. I'm working on a bouquet to welcome Mama home for good. Rather than worrying about the secret meanings of the flowers, I am trying to be like Tasha Tudor.

I do as she would do.

The boughs of Japanese maple I cut are waiting in a pail of water on the floor with the fern, chicory, marigolds, puncture vine, gray goldenrod, and Indian mustard, all of which I gathered this morning at dawn after a night of insomnia. I harvested the materials from the pasture south of the orchard, and from along the banks of the Silver River.

As I walked beside the river I saw the feral dog again. Walking along the other side, she didn't feel as feral as she did before, nor does she look as old. I watched her from the corner of my eye, and I watched her in the mirror that was made by the water running between us. She looks a lot like a blue heeler, the kind of dog the Fergesons use to herd their cows.

Every time I stopped, so did she.

I stopped to identify the wildflowers by flipping through my field guide and comparing the pictures against the reality. The dog traipsed through my peripheral vision, but when it was time to go home I looked for her and she was gone. Aside from the Japanese maple, the chicory, and the dark green fern, I only picked yellow flowers. I am not only bringing inside the gardens and the land she used to love, I am bringing her the light and warmth she must be missing. When Mama comes home today, she will find a benign sun waiting for her.

Money has been tight for everyone, and Billy finally took the job at Wallace Dairy they've been begging him to take for years. As their vet, he's at their beck and call. In return, he receives a solid salary plus room and board. When I called this morning, Billy told me he couldn't come.

“The cows have pinkeye,” he explained. “They need to be treated with antibiotics, and then I have to figure out what to do about the flies.” He sounded worried, but not about the animals; he was worried about me. That was when I realized I'd be okay. That I already was.

The wildflowers had filled, and would continue to fill, the void of waiting. They took the place of old habits; instead of tracking time by carving notches in my skin, I can arrange the plant material.

I found the floral frog when I was looking for the ashtray back in May. Gran swore to Christ there was an ashtray somewhere in the kitchen cabinets. “It's crystal,” she insisted. “Your grandfather smoked cigars on occasion—besides, we used to entertain, and back then everyone smoked. It was considered fashionable, but I've always found the habit to be repulsive.” Gran continues to be an expert at making remarks about my mother without doing so directly.

I used a step stool to search the high cabinets built along the ceiling in the kitchen, and just before I found the ashtray, I found the frog—only I didn't know what it was until Gran explained. “You put it at the bottom of a vase,” she said, “And then you stick flowers into it.” She was sitting at the kitchen table as she held the small bed of pins in her palm; it was the first time I'd ever seen her look nostalgic.

“Flower arranging was yet another skill I learned in charm school,” she said, but when I asked why the metal object was called a frog, she didn't know. “Maybe because it's green?” she offered, and then I wondered why the Flower Lady didn't sell them in her store.

I cut the maple at an angle so the branches better stick into the frog just as Gran showed me to do, and then I trim the marigold and add the spicy-smelling flowers to the arrangement. I use the kitchen scissors for the flowers, but for the branches I'm using a pair of pruners I found in the potting shed by the orchard and the remains of Mama's flower beds.

It's as if the potting shed had disappeared for years and years and the structure had suddenly reappeared. I swear I hadn't seen it there until I needed something to cut the branches from the trees, and as I remembered the potting shed the stones materialized as did the actual structure. The window was curtained with cobwebs, and the terra-cotta pots were beginning to crumble. Mama's straw hat was still hanging on the back of the door, and on the worktable, I saw her gardening gloves, the leather fingers stiff and brittle after so many damp summers and frozen winters—after so many years of not being worn.

I've decided to turn this building into my sanctuary.

I want to grow flowers of my own. I can make arrangements, both fresh and dried. And I can press the flowers too, and even sell them. Last spring, I began cutting branches of apple blossom from our orchard and gathering moss to sell to the Flower Lady. I can learn to make sachets and potpourri, and maybe even extract the essential oils of rose and lavender.

I'd like to live a life surrounded by flowers, but I could never work in a flower shop or deal with people all the time like Sissy does. I'd like to live in a home full of flowers, and I think Mama will like this too. It will be good for the both of us.

As I imagine my own gardens and how they will wander away from the immediate yard to blend into the wild beyond as do the gardens of Tasha Tudor, I add more flowers to the bouquet for Mama, and I'm just finishing the arrangement when Daddy's Dodge comes rattling down the driveway, followed by a long trail of brown dust.

There's been a terrible drought this summer, and when I went to church with Gran last Sunday, everyone prayed for rain. I held my breath and crossed my fingers instead, and Gran didn't scold me when she saw. She just pursed her lips, nodded as if to approve, and went back to praying.